Derby Talk

Derby Talk is a forum for Pinewood Derby, Awana Grand Prix, Kub Kar Rally, Shape N Race Derby, Space Derby, Raingutter Regatta and other similar races where a child and an adult work together to create a race vehicle and a lot of fun and memories

Well, my son completed his cars last night. All that is left to do is test and tune and pick the fastest car to use at the Pack race next weekend. If we place top 3, we'll also race at the District race in April.

We forgot one speed step, spraying the axles with pledge. Hopefully that won't come back to haunt us as we have no plans to pull axles to spray them.

Here are pics of the 2 cars he built. One has a longer wheel base than the other. They have about a 5/8" COM and use 23 cubes.

Scrollsawer wrote:Those are very cool cars Birddog! If the number 72 the Pack number? If not, what's the significance?

Question about your Pledge statement: Do you typically use Pledge like folks use Brasso on their axles? Or do you do it in addition to Brasso?

My understanding of Pledge is that you spray your axles with it after polishing and then wipe off the excess to leave a thin film. Let it sit overnight in a dust-free place and then use it with graphite like you would normally.

Scrollsawer wrote:Those are very cool cars Birddog! If the number 72 the Pack number? If not, what's the significance?

Question about your Pledge statement: Do you typically use Pledge like folks use Brasso on their axles? Or do you do it in addition to Brasso?

My understanding of Pledge is that you spray your axles with it after polishing and then wipe off the excess to leave a thin film. Let it sit overnight in a dust-free place and then use it with graphite like you would normally.

Right, after polishing axles with your favorite polishing compound, you spray them with pledge and let them sit over night. supposedly a thin film of wax is applied to the axles that makes them faster when used with graphite. We did this last year for both the pack and MA cars and it seemed to help.

FWIW, the shorter wheel base car was faster in our test runs (by about 0.005). So, we are going with that one. The race is this Saturday.

Birddog,
These looks really nice. I am sure its a bittersweet moment. I made a few fender cars and never seems to get any faster than my non-fender cars. Unsure if this was just too small of a sample size or perhaps I was always off by a hair with my fenders. We went with a 5.25 in wheel base which I think is the sweet spot between better stability and maximizing the time on the slope of the track (no fenders).
Best of luck.
P.S. We also use pledge as described above. This year I coated, blotted off excess, dried with canned air and dropped into a baggie of graphite (until assembly time)
Noskills

The final race is complete and my son is now the 5 time pack champion. His car ran a pretty consistent 2.93xy where x was 1-3. He had one time that was a 2.929x. Very fast times for this 42' best track (probably the fastest we've ever seen). There was only one other car running sub 3 second times and that car averaged a 2.99xy. I measured the slope of the track and saw a 28 degree reading with my protractor app on my smartphone. I think that was too steep.

I liked this build the best as the only thing I did was instruct, project manage and do one cut on the band saw. Everything else was done by him. He did most everything last year as well, but this year I wanted him to completely own it. I still played a large "project management" role to keep the build on time, as he would rarely come to me and say "we better get a coat of paint on tonight Dad, to stay on time" (does any 11 year old do that?).

His next (and last ever) race will be the District race in April. He's taken 1st the last 2 years, so our sights are aimed high.

For those still racing, I plan to offer up some nice supplies in the for sale sections of this board soon.

Man, most all of you on here have some early PWD seasons! Are pack hasn't even passed out cars yet, or really even mentioned our PWD yet this year. Our pack races are mid March, and our District is mid April!

We just finished the district race on Saturday and capped off the career with another district championship. It was much closer this year, which made it even more fun.

3 time district champ, 1 time district runner up and one race that wasn't timed properly. It was a good run (not to mention lots of success at the Mid America race). Not spending $ on a Mid America car this year as we are now focused on Boy Scout activities.

Still selling off some tools/supplies/track, but other than that, we are done!

Good luck to everyone and thanks for all the great advice on this forum over the years!

You know it doesn't have to be over. My son built several more cars as a Boy Scout. He was a Den Chief and would work with his boys and race in the Pack siblings/leader races. True you can't go on to District or Council races, but the joy of building can still be there. My son has now aged out and is almost exclusively involved with Order of the Arrow. I'm an Assistant District Commissioner among other roles, and I'm still building.